Refer Your Friends & Get SEOmoz PRO for&nbspFree!

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Editor's note: Since the publication of this post, Moz has discontinued its referral program. While we're leaving this post up for posterity's sake (transparency FTW!), please note that referrals -- while absolutely awesome and strongly encouraged -- will no longer earn a discount. Carry on!

Alright SEOmoz PRO members, are you ready for some good news? Drum roll please...today we launched our PRO Refer-a-Friend Program! What does this mean for you? It means you might not have to pay for your PRO membership ever again. I wanted to take some time today and walk you through the goals of the program and get you all started on your way to a free PRO membership.

If you are a PRO member and want to jump right in, you can see it live here! [link removed]

So Why Launch a Referral Program?

Here at SEOmoz we are constantly looking for new ways to reward our awesome PRO members. About a year ago we launched the affiliate program which paid out a $25.00 commission to anyone who sent us a free trial signup. This has been great for our affiliate-minded supporters, but I have heard from a number of people that they don't want to receive checks from us in return for their support. We thought about this for a while, and realized that we had another way to say thank you -- free PRO service.

As of today if you are a SEOmoz PRO member and you refer us a new free trialer that sticks around after their 30-day trial is over, we will credit your account $100.00. Exciting huh? We know that many of you pitch us to your clients, to other colleagues, and to your social networks...now you can get free PRO for those. Karma is a beautiful thing.

Whoa, Thats Great! But How Does it Work?

When you login and click "My Account" you will see a "Referrals" link. You can click this or navigate to your referrals dashboard through the Referrals top nav link.

This dashboard with be your data hub for your referral program. You can share your unique referral link, monitor people signing up through it, and keep track of your credits. We also have some added some pretty cool analytics (more on that below).

We have provided three ways for you to share your referral link right from the dashboard! You can either:

Use the unique link. This can be used anywhere! Feel like dropping it in a chat with someone? Go for it.

Share it socially! We've given you a one-click option for sharing your unique link on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Go ahead and share with your networks, they need SEO too.

Lastly, we wanted you to have an easy way to share your link via email. You can insert your entire address book if you want, and we will send them an email letting them know a friend has invited them to try SEOmoz PRO. Cool, huh?

Even better is we have given you the ability to track the source of each successful referral! We know marketers love analytics, so we geeked out a bit here. When someone signs up we track the source and show you, so you will know if sharing socially is more effective for you than email, or more effectively than a direct link sent. Say it with me friends -- data FTW!

In addition to giving you a number of ways to share the link we wanted this experience to be as customized as possible. We know that a personalized experience is key to success. No matter what source you use to share your link, the referral that clicks through will be brought to a custom lander that lets them know you are sharing SEOmoz PRO with them! It looks like this:

The entire sharing process has been optimized for maximum success! If you have suggestions on how else we can improve this process so your referrals are more successful, please include them in the comments below or email me at joanna@seomoz.org.

So Let's Talk Tracking

Now that you understand how you can share SEOmoz PRO with friends that need some SEO tools, lets talk about the tracking we've set up. If you click on the tab "My Referrals" you are going to see a real-time tracking dashboard. You can see below we have tried to provide a plethora of valuable data on each person you get to sign up for a free trial.

We provide you with the following:

Referral: The username that person has signed up with (for privacy reasons we have decided not to put the email here)

Days Left in Free Trial: Ths shows how many days are left before a referral becomes PRO, so you can see how close you are to your credit

Source: This is where you can see what channel is working for you and optimize your efforts

Status: This shows you if they made it from free trial to a PRO member, or if they cancelled

Hide: This is where you can delete people out of view, if you want to keep your list more manageable

The goal with this detailed view is to help every PRO member know exactly where they stand with the referrals they have sent out, and also to provide some cool data to help you improve your chance for successful referrals in the future.

Okay Now Let's Talk Money

Now that you have a sense of how it works, and what each piece shows you, let's talk money! We have provided a "Referral Stats" scoreboard on your dashboard to help you see a top-level view of your referrals. You will be able to see;

How many total people you have referred into a free trial

How many total people have stuck around past the 30-day trial

The total dollars we have credited your account as a result

We will be updating all totals on your scoreboard for easy monitoring! If you think about it, if you refer 12 people this week, and they all become PRO members, you will have SEOmoz PRO free for the next year.

You may be also be thinking we are crazy for doing this...and you might be right. However, we know that you guys are the ones working in the SEO trenches everyday, and you guys know better than us who could use our software, and benefit from our service. We are both leaning on you, and rewarding you for your awesomeness. This refer-a-friend program is another way for us to say thank you for supporting us.

So what are you waiting for? Jump on in there, and try it out. I'd love to hear your thoughts on the program below, and if you have ideas on how we can make it better, we welcome those suggestions as well!

About JoannaLord —
Joanna is the VP of Growth Marketing at SEOmoz. She loves startups, coffee & hugs. That about sums her up.

It's so great to see you guys digging the idea. The team here is pretty excited about what this could mean for our customers. We have a number of people tell us that our $99 PRO option is just a hair too high for them, and most of them are consultants. We really believe this new program will be a great opportunity to help that group directly. I hope to publish some stats at some point that show off what sort of engagement and data we can see from all this tracking. Fingers crossed the customers are as excited about it as the team is here!

I cry foul. Those screenshots show that Casey has something called "friends". Can't be true.

Seriously though, good job to all involved - this should be a great opportunity for people to get free money. Also a great opportunity for young hustlers starting out in the industry to get free pro by constantly referring people. Win win.

The idea of having Pro Access for free is obviously a great incentive for all Pro members. It crossed my mind to ask a question. Am I correct in thinking that should we be lucky enough to build up a substantial credit through referrals, we would have the option of perhaps upgrading a Pro account to the next level?

I have to say also ... thank you so much for "getting it" when it comes to maximizing conversions with the personalized landing page :)

Motivating your users to perform the actions most important to your business... Very smart move Joanna!

Now you've got user ID tracking in place, may I recomend you parse an ID into the URL for any share action on the site (tweet, facebook shares, linkedin) - so that way the community members who are logged in & pro can be rewarded for sharing without having to fetch the URL each time...

I'm using SEOmoz as one of the examples in a gamification post on SEOgadget tomorrow AM - you could make this system a lot of fun by implementing game mechanics - maybe a leaderboard with a competition for the top referers would be epic (with an appropriate prize, of course!).

Just as a suggestion for an epic prize, how about the SEOmoz team come and do mozinars / whiteboard fridays / seminars from pro members offices?

Thank you. This is nice to see. One thing I believe would benefit all parties involved is a built-in renewal incentive. If the referrals renew for another year(ongoing) and I am still a pro member, than I would view that as a win-win for everyone and have a payout for these scenarios as well. It's great to see that you guys are always pushing forward.

Hmm... I like this. Though, I'm sad it only applies to PRO members. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to go PRO, I am just unable to do so at present, though I would still love to help get SEOmoz some new subscribers!

On another vein (and I almost feel dirty saying this) could this be combined with your affiliate program? Yeah, I'm scum, but that would be an effective incentive to refer actively.

That's what I thought, too. It would be interesting to know why they decided to make it PRO only. Fraud risk?

What about making it available to all users, but with less payout for non-PROs? This way there still is the incentive to be PRO yourself and fraud risk is reduced because 1 referal isn't enough for a full month..

Just for the tracking system applied to this idea, this opportunity is one not to be missed... it is a wonderful way to test your best social conversion funnel. And somehow the daily update give it a nice "game" scent.